Big money is already losing some money, AFAIK. I'm in Amsterdam and there's news every other week of a big company or organization moving to Amsterdam _already_, just in case brexit goes through.
that's just a bad point to make? I mean of course a newer platform will have fewer.
UI is a good point (although I prefer it this way). But there's Pinafore[0] or Halcyon[1], or Brutaldon[2] that allow you to change the UI layout if you log in with those.
It's not mentioned but it depends on the instance how long the character limit is (as in, it's configurable). default is 500, but there's some with a limit of 5000, or 666 (some witchy instance iirc)
>Because Mastodon is full of like-thinking people, and the ones they'd strongly disagree with aren't joining.
or they're on other instances. there's some far-right political instances, for example (that the leftist crowd of the larger majority of early adopters don't really talk to, although they could in most cases)
so join an instance with lax moderation. or set up your own.
if you're thinking "that's expensive", look into Pleroma, it can run on a $1 a month server or a raspi. Set something up purely for you, then find some people on other instances you'd like to follow
That's not really answering my questions. I understand that different Mastodon instances have different moderation. I don't understand how that ties into the usage of the service as a Twitter clone.
Who decides how content is relayed? Can I be on multiple instances at the same time? If don't like my instance anymore, can I seamlessly move to another one?
Frankly, I don't even want to have all these questions, it's too complicated. I'll just stick with Twitter.
I mean things are relayed if you ask for them to be. Two cases, pretty much: (1) someone is following someone else, content is asked for by the one server and pushed to the other. (2) You look up a URL (someone's posts, a profile, etc) and it asks the other server for it. Of course you can block certain instances from asking for stuff, or block/mute specific people if you'd like to, so it's not just out there for anyone to grab (except of course that it's the internet, so realistically nothing is ephemeral).
>Can I be on multiple instances at the same time? If don't like my instance anymore, can I seamlessly move to another one?
Of course you can be on multiple instances. Just like you can make multiple emails. Same case though: why would you? some edge cases (being able to see multiple local/home timelines for example, even from people you're not following, via the 'local timeline' tab). So yeah, there's people that have multiple accounts, just like you can have a few reddit or HN accounts if you'd like to. There's definitely usecases, but most people just have the one account. Moving is being worked on, it's not 'seamless' by any means, but you can download a backup of followers etc and upload that to another instance, and have your old account forward to the new one (preventing people from using your old handle, and also meaning that if there's a link somewhere they'd know where you moved to).
>Frankly, I don't even want to have all these questions, it's too complicated. I'll just stick with Twitter.
Do your thing, but I hope you know most people don't necessarily have these questions. If you introduced email or reddit to someone they wouldn't necessarily right away think of data portability, multiple accounts, etc. The onboarding needs a bunch of work, but for basic usage it's really not all that hard.
Thanks for the info, I'm still unclear on this (my original question):
If I'm on one instance, and some person is on another instance, if that person gets kicked out of that instance (for a poor joke, let's say), do I lose access to all their messages?
From what I gather by your answer, the answer is "Yes". They need to get another account and I need to follow them on a new one, which may imply I need a new account as well.
Further, if I go for a "free speech" instance, I will run the risk of getting blocked (by proxy) by other instances because of what other people do on that instance.
On Twitter, this isn't such a big problem because people don't get banned that easily, but with all these moderators and "codes of conduct" being emphasized for Mastodon, I think it will be a problem.
> Do your thing, but I hope you know most people don't necessarily have these questions.
They will have the question of "why do I want this?". One answer to that is "no single corporate entity decides who gets to see what", but from what I understand the whole system is worse. All this complication to fight "outrage" and "harassment" which I don't think most people are bothered with in the first place.
Kiiiind of, but there's quite some general instances. Most of them are more like a "here's some people interested in the same subjects as you". So yes, on my (politically motivated, I guess) instance I find quite some people with the same political slant (and some commentary on that), but many cats, daily stories, etc. Just like twitter or other platforms. It's worth a try seeing what joinmastodon.org tells you, and have a look.
Now I see. I looked around and it seemed hard to choose 'the right instance' to begin, knowing nothing about the platform. Most had esoteric names, like clubs. It might be a nice idea for Mastodon advocates to create general topic instances, that may feel more approachable for newcomers.
In any case, it does seem like a great platform and might blow up in time with few changes in the onboarding process
>It might be a nice idea for Mastodon advocates to create general topic instances, that may feel more approachable for newcomers.
Yeah, the instance names are often quite silly, but there's silly people on there. I mean 3000 variations of "mastodonUKsocial.com" or something wouldn't really tell you all that much more. If you don't want to go to mastodon.social, the biggest english language instance, octodon.social is a good, smaller (~11k users) general instance with a good vibe. Fwiw i think a lot of people use twitter to follow 'their kind of people' (lgbt groups, open source fans, music people) and this codifies those groups a bit more into proper instances/servers/communities, while of course allowing you to follow other people.
